Where Secularization Leads — The Future of Faith and Politics

Our long journey has reached its final chapter. Beginning from the unity of worship and rule in antiquity, we saw Christianity and empire, the priestly and royal powers of the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the wars of religion, and then the establishment of the modern separation of religion and state and of freedom of belief. From there, as a comparative history, we traced America’s evangelicals, Islamic politics in the Middle East, Hindu nationalism in India, Christian democracy in Europe, State Shinto in Japan and its postwar religious parties, the rise of religious conservatives across the world, and even into the shadow of the cult problem.

What I want to pause and consider at the end is what lies ahead. Many intellectuals of the twentieth century predicted that, as society modernized and science advanced, religion would gradually withdraw from the center of people’s lives. This is what is called secularization. That prediction did, in one respect, come true. Yet reality has taken a more complicated shape.

Secularization Advances, Yet Religion Grows Too

Looking across the world, two currents are occurring at the same time. One is that people without faith — those who answer that they belong to no particular religion — are increasing, mainly in the developed regions. In parts of Europe and East Asia, religion is treated as a private matter, and the tendency to keep it at a distance from daily life and politics is said to be strengthening. This is the side in which the prediction of secularization has indeed become reality.

But there is another current, one that looks like its very opposite. Across the world as a whole, the number of people who believe in a religion is, rather, continuing to grow. According to the estimate of one research institute, in regions where population growth is marked, faith is deeply rooted in daily life, and the world’s religious population is expected to keep expanding. While the proportion of people without faith slowly rises, the absolute number of believers increases. Secularization and the revitalization of religion — also called re-religionization — are advancing on this earth at the same time.

Why does this happen? For one thing, there is a demographic circumstance: the more devout a region, the more easily its population tends to grow. For another, perhaps there is a movement of the heart by which, in times of anxiety and rapid change, people turn toward faith all the more in search of meaning and belonging. In any case, the forecast that religion will eventually vanish has become, at least on a global scale, something that does not fit reality.

The Separation of Religion and State Keeps Being Questioned in Changing Forms

The ideal of the separation of religion and state, which we placed at the starting point of this series, is by no means a matter settled in the past. Rather, the more diverse a society becomes, the more its meaning is questioned anew.

The separation of religion and state is the idea of avoiding the binding of the state to a particular religion, and of guaranteeing freedom equally to every faith, and to the choice of having no faith. Yet its concrete form differs greatly from country to country. There are countries that thoroughly keep religion away from public spaces, countries that grant a particular religion a historical status while also protecting the freedom of other faiths, and countries comparatively tolerant of the expression of faith. None is the one and only correct answer; each is a form of balance that a particular history and society has chosen for itself.

In the modern age, this ideal faces new and difficult questions. Through immigration and internationalization, multiple faiths have come to coexist within a single society. To what extent may faith be expressed in public spaces; how should faith be accommodated at school or in the workplace; when religious values collide with modern senses of rights concerning sexuality and life, how are they to be reconciled? Each of these is nothing other than the work of redrawing the old ideal of the separation of religion and state within a new reality.

To Coexist in a Diverse Society

So, for people of faith and people without it, and for people who believe in different religions, to live together in the same society, what can serve as a clue? What has come into view through this series is several modest pieces of wisdom.

One is to protect freedom of belief as the freedom to believe and, at the same time, as the freedom not to believe. Not forcing faith on anyone and not demeaning anyone’s faith are the front and back of the same principle. Another is to take on the balance in the middle — neither shutting religion out of public discussion entirely, nor uniting a particular religion with the state — a balance that constantly requires adjustment. And yet another is to keep both the perspective of people with faith and the perspective of people without it at the table of dialogue, without deciding either one to be justice.

Here, across ten chapters, we have looked at the long history in which faith has moved nations. The single line drawn between God and Caesar has been redrawn, at times erased, and drawn again, age by age and region by region. That line will go on wavering. What we can do is not to leap to one extreme or the other, but to keep gazing, with equal weight, at the dignity of those who believe and the freedom of those who do not.

I am deeply grateful that you have stayed with this long story to the very end. If this series has become a clue for feeling, even a little more vividly, the history of faith and politics that lies beyond the news, nothing could make me happier.

【Religion and Politics: When Faith Moves Nations — End】